CATALOGUING THE WOES OF INDIES ABROAD

In addition to all of challenging economic factors, one adversary indie film has had in the last year is the press. Gone are the puff pieces about filmmakers “making it” by gambling their mortgage on their indie film and then scoring big. Those human interest-type stories have faded away in the last year as the financing of the indie sector itself became the story. There’s not a lot new in Lauren A.E. Schuker’s Wall Street Journal piece, “Indie Films Suffer Dropoff in Rights Sales,” but when it comes to independent film foreign sales, the piece impressively catalogues all the bad news in one place.

Here’s the conclusion, but I’d recommend clicking on the link and reading the whole piece.

Still, [Initial’s Graham King] says the film industry has never seen the foreign-sales market slow across the board as has happened in recent months. “You always had economic woes somewhere, and you could make it up by selling to another country,” says Mr. King. “But now it’s on a global basis, and the independents overseas have lost all their credit — so without that credit they can’t buy movies. It’s very, very worrying.”